The Danish government has recalled its ambassador from Iran and has accused the intelligence services of the Islamic Republic of plotting an assassination operation on Danish soil. Danish government officials also said that Copenhagen would seek to impose further economic and diplomatic sanctions on Tehran, in coordination with the European Union. The accusations against Iran were leveled during an emergency news conference in the Danish capital on Tuesday, led by Anders Samuelsen, Denmark’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, and Finn Borch Andersen (pictured), Director of the Danish Security and Intelligence Service, known as PET.

The two men said that “an Iranian intelligence agency” had planned “an attack on Danish soil”, which Defense Minister Samuelsen condemned as “completely unacceptable”. PET Director Andersen said that a Norwegian national of Iranian background had been arrested in Sweden on October 21, and was now in custody awaiting extradition to Denmark. The arrestee is an employee of Iranian intelligence, said Andersen, and had been observed conducting surveillance against a Danish-based leading member of an Iranian separatist group. The alleged target is a member of the Arab Struggle Movement for the Liberation of Ahvaz (ASMLA), a hardline separatist group campaigning for a separate homeland for Iran’s Arab minority. Approximately 2 percent of Iranians (around 1.5 million people) belong to the country’s ethnic Arab population. Most of them are concentrated in Khuzestan, a region in Iran’s oil-rich southwest, which borders neighboring Iraq. Some of these ethnic Arabs seek autonomy from Tehran, which they see as an alien regime. ASMLA represents the militant wing of Iran’s separatist Arab community and has a history of staging terrorist attacks inside Iran. Last September, the group claimed it was behind an armed attack on a military parade in the city of Ahvaz —a major urban center in Iran’s Arab-speaking region— which killed 24 people, including some women and children. Later, however, a representative of the group retracted the claim.

On Tuesday, several Iranian officials issued strong denials of the Danish government’s allegations. Speaking in Tehran, Iranian Foreign Ministry Spokesman Bahram Qassemi dismissed Denmark’s claims as “spiteful”. He added that the timing of reports linking Iran to assassination operations on European soil were suspect and described them as “a plot by [Iran’s] enemies to damage Tehran’s growing relations with European countries”. Earlier this month, France seized the financial assets of individuals whom it described as Iranian spies, after blaming Tehran for a foiled bomb attack in Paris. The move followed the arrest of six people in France, Germany and Belgium, who allegedly planned to bomb the annual conference of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) last June. The NCRI is led by Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK), a militant group with roots in radical Islam and Marxism, which Iran sees as a terrorist organization.

A leading suspect in a failed attempt to kill Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro using drones, has died in mysterious circumstances while being held by the country’s intelligence agency. The attack took place on August 4, 2018, in front of the Palacio de Justicia government complex in the Venezuelan capital Caracas. That afternoon, President Maduro was giving a nationally televised speech on the occasion of the 81st anniversary of the Bolivarian National Guard. An hour after the commencement of the outdoor ceremony, Maduro’s speech was interrupted by a loud noise that appeared to come directly from above, approximately 100 yards away from the podium. The noise turned out to have been a bomb affixed on a modified, commercially available drone. Moments later, another drone exploded after crashing into a building just two blocks northeast of where the Venezuelan president was standing. Seven members of the National Guard were injured in the attack.

President Maduro, who escaped unharmed, has blamed Colombia-based far-right extremists for the attack, and has named former Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos as their leader. But the Colombian government has rejected these allegations and has demanded to see proof. Throughout August, several people were arrested by Venezuelan authorities and charged with treason in connection with the assassination plot. Approximately 30 people have been named as participants in the plan. Among them was Fernando Albán, a 56-year-old critic of Maduro, who was serving as an opposition city councilor in Caracas. Althouth his arrest was announced on Friday, there were no reports about his fate over the weekend. On Monday, however, the government said that Albán had died after committing suicide. A subsequent report said that the 56-year-old had died after throwing himself out of a window located on the tenth floor of the headquarters of the Bolivarian Intelligence Service, where he was being held. Later on Monday, Nestor Luis Reverol, Venezuela’s Minister of Interior, said that Albán voluntarily jumped out of the window as he was being transported to court in order to be formally charged.

On Monday night, Venezuela’s Attorney General Tarek William Saab said during a television interview that Albán had been given permission to go to the bathroom and used it as an opportunity to kill himself. But critics of the government see the August 4 assassination attempt as a false-flag operation orchestrated by the Maduro administration to justify a new crackdown on the opposition. They claim that Albán was murdered and that it would have been impossible for him to throw himself out of a window given the security precautions that are in place at the Bolivarian Intelligence Service building. Meanwhile, Albán’s attorney, Joel Garcia, dismissed the Venezuelan government’s explanation of his client’s death as “totally false” and doubted that he would have been allowed to go to the bathroom unaccompanied.

A group of German radicals planned to assassinate Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev in East Germany in 1989, thus triggering a Soviet military invasion of the country, according to a new book written by a former British spy. The book is entitled Pilgrim Spy: My Secret War Against Putin, the KGB and the Stasi (Hodder & Stoughton publishers) and is written by “Tom Shore”, the nom de guerre of a former officer in the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6). The book chronicles the work of its author, who claims that in 1989 he was sent by MI6 to operate inside communist East Germany without an official cover. That means that he was not a member of the British diplomatic community in East Germany and thus had no diplomatic immunity while engaging in espionage. His mission was to uncover details of what MI6 thought was a Soviet military operation against the West that would be launched from East Germany.

In his book, Shore says that he did not collect any actionable intelligence on the suspected Soviet military operation. He did, however, manage to develop sources from within the growing reform movement in East Germany. The leaders of that movement later spearheaded the widespread popular uprising that led to the collapse of the German Democratic Republic and its eventual unification with West Germany. While finding his way around the pro-democracy movement, Shore says that he discovered a number of self-described activists who had been planted there by the East German government or the Soviet secret services. Among them, he says, were members of the so-called Red Army Faction (RAF). Known also as the Baader Meinhoff Gang or the Baader-Meinhof Group, the RAF was a pro-Soviet guerrilla group that operated in several Western European countries, including Germany, Belgium and Holland. Its members participated in dozens of violent actions from 1971 to 1993, in which over 30 people were killed. Among other attacks, the group tried to kill the supreme allied commander of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and launched a sniper attack on the US embassy in Bonn. The group is known to have received material, logistical and operational support from a host of Eastern Bloc countries, including East Germany, Poland and Yugoslavia.

According to Shore, the RAF members who had infiltrated the East German reform movement were planning to assassinate Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev during his official visit to East Germany on October 7, 1989. The visit was planned to coincide with the 40th anniversary celebrations of the formation of the German Democratic Republic in 1949, following the collapse of the Third Reich. Shore says he discovered that the assassination plot had been sponsored by hardline members of the Soviet Politburo, the communist country’s highest policy-making body, and by senior officials of the KGB. The plan involved an all-out military takeover of East Germany by Warsaw Pact troops, similar to that of Czechoslovakia in 1968. But Shore claims that he was able to prevent the RAF’s plan with the assistance of members of the East German reform movement. He says, however, that at least two of the RAF members who planned to kill Gorbachev remain on the run to this day. The RAF was officially dissolved in 1998, when its leaders sent an official communiqué to the Reuters news agency announcing the immediate cessation of all RAF activities. However, three former RAF members remain at large. They are Ernst-Volker Staub, Burkhard Garweg and Daniela Klette, all of them German citizens, who are believed to be behind a series of bank robberies in Italy, Spain and France in recent years.

Government prosecutors in Montenegro, the youngest member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, claim that a former officer of the United States Central Intelligence Agency helped pro-Russian plotters organize a coup in 2016. In October of that year, authorities in Montenegro accused “nationalists from Russia and Serbia” of staging a failed plot. Their goal was allegedly to kill the country’s then-Prime Minister Milo Dukanović, spark a pro-Russian coup in the country, and prevent its entry into NATO. The allegations surfaced after 20 Serbians and Montenegrins were arrested in Montenegro for allegedly planning an armed coup. The arrests took place on election day, October 16, 2016, as Montenegrins were voting across the Balkan country of 650,000 people. The plotters had even hired a “long-distance sharpshooter” who was “a professional killer” for the task of killing Đukanović, according to Montenegrin police. After killing the prime minister, the plotters allegedly planned to storm the parliament and prompt a pro-Russian coup.

Russia has vehemently denied the allegations. But in March of last year, the then British foreign secretary Boris Johnson appeared to validate the Montenegrin government’s allegations. Since then, a sensational trial has been taking place in the Montenegrin capital Podgorica of the 20 men who were arrested in October 2016, in addition to two Russians who are being tried in absentia. During the trial, prosecutors fingered Joseph Assad, a former CIA officer, as a co-conspirator in the coup plot. The Egyptian-born Assad served as a counter-terrorism expert in the CIA after arriving in the US in 1990, but eventually left the agency to launch his own security firm. It is believed that at the time of the alleged coup plot, Assad’s firm was employed by Aron Shaviv, a political strategist connected with the Democratic Front, a vocal pro-Russian opposition party in Montenegro. Shaviv, who has joint British and Israeli citizenship, said he hired Assad’s firm to provide counter-surveillance against Montenegro’s security services. According to Shaviv, the Montenegrin authorities spied on him and harassed him because of his connections to a domestic political party that is seen as pro-Russian.

But prosecutors in the trial of the alleged coup plotters claim that Assad’s role was to organize and provide escape routes and methods for the coup plotters. In light of these allegations, a warrant has been issued for Assad, accusing him of “operating a criminal enterprise”, according to Britain’s Guardian newspaper. Assad has rejected the charges as a “deception campaign”. In a statement issued on Saturday, he said he was “a loyal American who had no role in any crimes or coup in Montenegro”. Meanwhile, the Democratic Front and a number of other opposition parties in Montenegro denounced the government’s claims of a failed coup as “publicity stunts” aimed at distracting the country’s citizens from the state of the economy and other domestic concerns.

One of Syria’s leading pro-government newspapers has said that Israel was behind a bomb blast in Hama province that killed a senior scientist working for the country’s missile program. Aziz Azbar was reportedly a senior research director at the Syrian Scientific Studies and Research Center, known as CERS. The Damascus-based agency is thought to be at the center of the Syrian government’s formidable chemical weapons program. Last year, the United States Department of the Treasury imposed economic sanctions on nearly 300 CERS employees, after Washington accused them of being directly responsible for the Syrian government’s repeated use of chemical weapons against rebels and civilians. The European Union, as well as the French and British governments, also imposed sanctions on CERS and its staff.

According to Syrian media, Azbar specialized in developing and maintaining rocket systems in the city of Masyaf, located about 160 miles north of Damascus, where CERS maintains a research facility. He reportedly died last Saturday night when his car suddenly blew up. According to some reports, the blast originated from a bomb that had been placed in the headrest of his car seat and was detonated remotely. His driver was also killed in the blast, according to Syrian media reports. An insurgent group calling itself the Abu Amara Battalions, which is linked with the Sunni Levant Front in Syria’s Aleppo province, issued a statement claiming responsibility for Azbar’s killing. The Abu Amara Battalions have previously issued similar statements after reportedly assassinating Syrian government officials or militia commanders.

However, on Sunday Syria’s al-Watan newspaper said that the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad was responsible for Azbar’s death. The Syrian scientist was “a person of the utmost interest to Israel” said the paper, because of his direct connection to Damascus’ Russian- and North Korean-built Scud missile arsenal. However, officials in Israel refused to acknowledge that Tel Aviv had any connection with Azbar’s killing. “Every day in the Middle East there are hundreds of explosions and settling of scores”, said Israel’s Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman. “Every time they try to pin the blame on [Israel], so we won’t take this [latest accusation] too seriously”, he added. The Syrian government has not made any formal statements regarding Azbar’s death.

A man has been arrested by British counter-terrorism police in Northern Ireland, reportedly in connection with the assassination of a Seychelles exiled political leader in London in 1985. No-one has ever been charged with the murder of Gérard Hoarau, who was gunned down with a Sterling submachine gun in Edgware, London, on November 29, 1985. At the time of his killing, the 35-year-old Hoarau led the Mouvement Pour La Resistance (MPR), which was outlawed by the Seychelles government but was supported by Western governments and their allies in Africa. The reason was that the MPR challenged the president of the Seychelles, France-Albert René, leader of the leftwing Seychelles People’s United Party —known today as the Seychelles People’s United Party. The British-educated René assumed the presidency via a coup d’etat in 1977, which was supported by neighboring Tanzania, and remained in power in the island-country until 2004.

Despite proclaiming that he espoused a “moderate socialist ideology”, his critics —including Hoarau— accused him of being a secret admirer of Cuban-style communism and called for his removal from office. In 1979, Hoarau was one of several critics of René who were ordered to leave the Seychelles under threat of imprisonment. He initially found refuge in South Africa. But in 1981, the Seychelles security forces foiled an armed invasion by South African-supported mercenaries, which aimed to depose René. The mercenaries —most of them South African Special Forces veterans, former Rhodesian soldiers, Belgian veterans of the Congo Crisis, and American Vietnam War veterans— were led by British-Irish mercenary Thomas Michael “Mad Mike” Hoare. The group of over 50 armed men was intercepted at the Seychelles International Airport in Mahé and managed to escape only after taking hostages and hijacking an Air India passenger airplane that happened to be at the airport. However, they left behind five mercenaries, including at least one officer of South Africa’s National Intelligence Service.

In 1982, South Africa struck a deal with the Seychelles for the release of the captured mercenaries. In return, it promised to stop sheltering René’s opponents, including Hoarau. The latter was thus forced out of South Africa and sought refuge in London, England, where he was assassinated three years later. At the time of Hoarau’s killing, there was strong suspicion that the government of the Seychelles was directly involved in his assassination. There were also reports in the British press that a British hitman may have been hired to assassinate Hoarau. But despite several arrests in connection with the case, no-one was ever charged with the Seychellois exiled leader’s assassination. This, however, may soon change. In 2016, the British Metropolitan police re-opened the case and, according to a police press statement “established fresh lines of inquiry”. On Thursday, a 77-year-old man was reportedly arrested in Antrim town, Northern Ireland, by officers of the Metropolitan Police and the Police Service of Northern Ireland. The man, who has not been named, was transported to London for questioning “on suspicion of conspiracy to murder”. A police spokesman said on Thursday that the man had not previously been arrested as part of the Hoarau murder investigation.

A number of European intelligence agencies have reportedly warned the Turkish government of a possible assassination attempt against the country’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, during an official state visit to Bosnia and Herzegovina. On Sunday the Turkish leader embarked on a week-long visit to the Balkans, beginning with Bosnia, which along with Albania is seen as Turkey’s strongest political ally in Europe. During his visit to Bosnia, Mr. Erdoğan is scheduled to meet with Bakir Izetbegovic, one of the country’s three presidents. He is also scheduled to address a rally of expatriate Turks in the Bosnian capital Sarajevo, held in support of his ruling Justice and Development Party.

On Saturday night, Turkey’s state-owned TRT broadcaster reported that the Turkish president’s delegation had been warned about a possible assassination attempt against him. According to TRT, the information came initially from the intelligence services of the Republic of Macedonia, another state of the former Yugoslavia, which, like Bosnia, has a large Muslim population. Turkish intelligence were reportedly warned that a group of militant opponents of Mr. Erdoğan living in the Balkans were planning to kill him, said the report. It was allegedly followed by similar warnings issued by unnamed “Western intelligence agencies”. TRT did not provide further details about the alleged plot, but said that an “in-depth investigation” was underway by Turkish intelligence.

The Turkish president is facing one of the most direct challenges of his political career in less than two weeks, when Turks will go to the polls to elect a new parliament and —potentially— a new president. Some political commentators believe that, come June 2, Mr. Erdoğan may be removed from power after 15 years in the country’s leadership. But members of his government appeared unphased. One of them, Deputy Prime Minister Bakir Bozdag, tweeted on Saturday that warnings about Mr. Erdoğan’s life were “not new, and have always been there. Our President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is not a person who will be afraid of the threats and change his policy”, wrote Mr. Bozdag. And he continued: “Those, who have not understood that yet, are fools”.